Anyone good with Arena 3.5 or Engine Matches?

It's easy to have two engines play each other in Arena. It's easy to have a whole tournament. But here is the thing...

Anyone know how to have two engines play each other....with independent settings? 

When you run engines against each other, or a tournament, it asks you for a time control for the whole thing, which you can set to a certain time, or ply depth. But it applies to all the engines. I need to have some engines fight....on different settings.

"But Face, what would you ever do that?"

Well, Komodo doesn't have ELO settings, but if you run him at Ply Depth, you can dial him in to just about whatever strength you need. Stintz has their strength built into the personality files. You mess with anything in the GUI and it messes them up. And some Engines I need to set the ELO instead of ply. Any way to have them fight with independent settings? I don't want to have two GUIs open, making them fight by transferring all the moves myself anymore! 

Using Komodo, I don't know of any way in Arena (or any other GUI) to do what you want to do. Maaaybeee, if you have two computers, Arena's autoplayer feature MIGHT work, but I'm not even sure of that. (Never used that feature - Need a null modem cable, etc...).

There are some Winboard engines like Crafty that you can set the ply level in the engine's internal configuration file. That would work, but you'd have to get away from trying to use Komodo.

Oh, and I've never heard of Stintz; I have no idea what it is.

Thanks Escher, you're the one I can count on to reply to my engine threads

When I say "Komodo" I am really using it as a term for an engine without the ability to set the ELO in the Arena GUI. While I use Komodo a lot, that could be Zappa, Stockfish, Glaurang, or any engine where the "Limit Playing Strength to Elo" setting is greyed out. The best way to set these engines for strength is through ply depth. They move very quickly, and you can dial them along a pretty good gradient by around 60-70 Elo per ply depth (according to some papers and publication - I looked into it) 

But, ideally, setting the ELO is the most fun, so I have some Engines dialed in that way, like Rybka, Hiarcs, Arasan, Shredder and a few others. That way, you can dial in strength along a very fine gradient, and people could presumably track their progress with much finer gradation than having to have your program jump 70 ELO (approx) each ply depth. 

So I have great engines set both ways. The issue, is to see how stong they are among each other, and when fighting the Ply family against the ELO family, I have to choose one of the settings in the "Adjust Level" window under levels at the tournament prompt. For ELO family engines, you set a fast time control and they will go at it. For the Ply family, you have to set ply depth. But they are mutually exclusive. You can't have both in the same tourny. So, if I want to fight an engine from the ELO family against a Ply family engine, I have to open both up in independant arena instances, and move back and forth between programs as the engines move. It's fun, and you really get to see how they go at it (Good lord you should see Johnny Hecktor and Zappa Fight, it's a freakshow). But, it takes time to get through a tourney this way. 

Then there are engines that are set, as you said, via their internal config .ini or .per file. That's how Stintz works. It's an engine with dozens of personalities all with configurable playstyles through the .per files. Rodent works this way too. You can adjust the aggression, defense, peice preference, and tune them how you want them (Say you have a weird playing defensive guy at the club. Tune an engine to play from an unorthedox opening book and set aggression low and king safety high.) And, the strength of these engines is set via a "Depth" variable and sometimes time or nodes variable in their .per files. You just set the "Level" in Arena to "Infinite" and the .per file makes each personality play at the right speed and strength. 

So three different methods to set strength, but only one option for "level" in a tournament. Not sure how to make them all fight outside of manually. 

Oh, OK, it's Szint, not Stintz. I downloaded it a while back but never messed with it. It's an Ivanhoe derivative - It does look interesting.

"So three different methods to set strength, but only one option for 'level' in a tournament. Not sure how to make them all fight outside of manually."

Yeah, I don't think it's possible, unless the engine lets you set the node or ply level internally.

Well, enjoy your manual tournaments, but that's too much work for me. :)